This is a proposal for a website that would monitor various traffic patterns (highways, website load times, UPS, tech support) and track them on a day-to-day basis. Then, it could use the stored information to let you know what time of the day it would be fastest, or predict the traffic at other times of the day. It shouldn't be too hard -- just collect the information and stick it in a database -- but I'm too busy to take it on right now. What do you guys think?
-- aswartz, Jun 14 2000

Internet Weather Report http://www.mids.org/weather/
"Animated maps of current Internet lag." No prediction AFAICT. [egnor, Jun 14 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

Internet Traffic Report http://www.internettrafficreport.com
Also no prediction. [BigThor, Jun 14 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

speed maps http://www.halfbake...m/idea/speed_20maps
[egnor, Jun 14 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

Puget Sound Traffic Cameras http://www.wsdot.wa...undTraffic/cameras/
In response to [mhh5]. [egnor, Jun 14 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

I thought there was a project to put up video cameras around DFW airport to monitor traffic and make it all available on a website, so you could see how bad your traffic was going to be.... small digital cameras are pretty cheap, so it doesn't seem too far out there that this might be done on a larger scale....
-- mhh5, Jan 14 2001


MHH5, monitoring is not the point. Monitoring is thoroughly baked, and discussed elsewhere on the site. Prediction is key here, as is the fact that this technology could be generalized to any resource that can be congested.

Before I moved, I had to commute daily on a particularly bad stretch of freeway here in Seattle. I wanted to do what [aswartz] described (well before he described it). I went so far as to harvest raw data from the individual magnetic loop sensors. I had data sampled from hundreds of sensors once a minute for months. I had 2-D density plots of this data over time (distance along the freeway on the X axis, time on the Y axis); rush hour showed up as asymmetric bright blobs. I visualized the dependence of rush hour congestion timing on the day of the week and on major sporting events and scheduled lane closures (which I also recorded over time).

In true halfbakery fashion, I never actually implemented a prediction algorithm. Eventually, I just took a job on the other side of the lake, and it became a non-issue.
-- egnor, Jan 14 2001


Green, Yellow, Red -- I could understand. What color would work for "Camera On"?
-- reensure, Jan 14 2001


Infrared.
-- StarChaser, Jan 14 2001


hey, hey, hey! Did I miss something?! It looks like this idea has been cross-indexed in car:[general] AND computer:service. whoa! and not a single blip in the 'news' about this sort of thing!
-- absterge, Jan 15 2001


[Admin: The database supports ideas in multiple categories. I've stopped supporting them in the idea editor because the multi-selection interface was too confusing, and haven't really missed that feature. This was a leftover.]
-- jutta, Jan 16 2001



random, halfbakery